Purgatory Lost

I had a dream the other night after watching the series finale of Lost, in which, in complete contradiction of the advertising campaign, all my questions were not, in fact, answered. Not even close.

Which came neither as a surprise nor as a letdown, really, because by the sixth season of the show the writers had introduced and then abandoned so many dangling plot lines that there was no hope that they would ever resolve anything.

Lost was interesting as a kind of hybrid between an actual dramatic television show with a discernable story arc and a crowd-sourced meta-media program that had the bulk of its presumed depth bestowed upon it by the feverish imaginings of its fandom rather than by the conscious efforts of its creators.

Whereas most writers try to communicate the content of the plot, by the second season the crew of Lost seems to have focused their efforts on obfuscation. The establishing of mysteries became vastly more significant than their resolution, with new mysteries being introduced whenever the current ideas simply ran out of gas, with no tangible effort at providing clear, consistent, or meaningful answers. 

As time passed, this lack of coherence was labeled by many as sophistication. And in some ways, I think it was. After all, real life offers few concrete answers to its greatest enigmas.

The ideas of examining the paths not taken or of reexaming familiar events from multiple perspectives are interesting literary and philosophical devices that Lost returned to again and again. However, for the most part the show dealt with these concepts in the most shallow and inconsistent of ways. Changes were introduced for the sake of shock or some basic inability to ever complete anything. Let's go back in time! Let's have a parallel universe! Let's suddenly tack on an incoherent and rather flabby, lifeless mythology in the final season!

It's as if the show's creators were absolutely terrified of making any narrative choices.

At the same time, Lost had many wonderful characters and characterizations. It was by far the strongest element of the show. The writers seemed to have recognized this, to the extent that they began introducing new characters the way they introduced new mysteries, hoping that by adding and adding to the already brimming pot they would somehow end up with stone soup.

In the end, Lost ended up being an odd hybrid for me of very poor plotting mixed with generally interesting characterization, of storytelling that could trigger emotional reactions without satisfying me intellectualy at all. I watched all six seasons of the show, though by the last three years I wasn't really hooked. Would I recommend it to anybody who hadn't seen an episode before? Probably not.

Back to that dream.

In my dream, the original plane crash survivors found themselves on an eerie island. They interacted with inhabitants who didn't seem to be quite human and who formed different groups. One of these groups was very Taoist, another very scientific, another religiously dogmatic. We got repeated flashbacks into the pasts of individual characters as they tried to understand their environment and survive encounters with the strangeness around them. They even encountered a small group of people living on the beach, with whom they had confused interactions. None of these extras became major characters on the lines of Linus or Juliet. It was a dream, and none of these interactions were all that coherent.

Eventually, after certain encounters with the things on the island, we started getting different flashbacks, in which key characters relived events we'd already seen, but making different choices and experiencing different outcomes. Some of the beings from the island appeared in these new flashbacks. No time travel to the 1970s. No flash-forwards. Sometimes it seemed that the island contained passageways to other places in the world. There was a fair amount of suffering, but nobody ever seemed to die--those that did would reappear later.

In the end, it was revealed that all the main characters on the show were dead and that the island was a kind of spiritual purgatory where their souls were tested; they had to confront their greatest hopes and fears, to relive key moments of their lives and examine their choices. Some of the beings on the island were souls unable to move on, while others were caretakers and cryptic guides of a sort.

The show ended when rescue came for the Others on the beach, who were the actual survivors of the crash and who interacted with the main characters in dreams or by seeing them as ghosts. By the time this revelation came, some of the characters were willing to move on, leaving this world behind, while others were unprepared and remained behind, and a few chose to become caretakers to help the next group of souls.

Would this version of the show have been as popular as the one with the Dharma Initiative, the numbers, Jacob and the Smoke-Monster, the Others, time-travel, the parallel universe, and so forth? Or even the original show in which the supernatural elements were actually downplayed?

Almost certainly not. But for me, at least, it would have been more coherent and I would have better understood people's involvement.

We Are Related to Neanderthals? Intriguing.

At least, those of us of European or Southeast Asian descent are, according to recent DNA evidence acquired by sequencing Neanderthal DNA.

There's also a brief discussion of the implications of this discovery on this Caveman podcast from To the Best of Our Knowledge*.

As a very small number of you may know, I've been playing around with the idea of Neanderthals and other ancient hominids assuming the roles traditionally played by mythical humanoid species in epic fantasy. I've explored the idea of interbreeding as a part of that, so this evidence interests me.

*(Following that discussion on the podcast, there's a discussion with archaeologist Brian Fagan about his recent book on Cro-Magnons that I found myself snorting out loud at, due to the utter confidence with which Fagan offered as factual statements a series of completely unqualified assessments as to how the art of the Cro-Magnons revealed the depth of their supernatural belief system and the showmanship of their rituals, in spite of the fact that he HAS to be INTERPRETING and investing with psychological and emotional signifance a limited set of ancient visual and physical evidence that is, by the way, completely lacking in either written records or any kind of explanatory oral history or myths that might actually reveal feelings that are otherwise lost to time. His ideas are interesting, and he may be correct, but what he's stating as facts are conjectures that can't be proven. As someone with an extensive scientific background, his abuse of this distinction between hypothesis and empirical fact was a bit startling to me. Hopefully the book is more nuanced.)

If the Tea Party Was Black

This is a thought-provoking post asking how we would view the actions of the Tea Party if its participants were black, which actually refers to events that have taken place in the name of the Tea Party and the hateful things that people supporting it have said.

Astonishingly, there are still a few people who bothered to offer comments that boil down to just saying, "Nuh-uh!" How anyone can observe the actions of the Tea Party and their supporters and genuinely claim that in NO WAY are they playing up a racial angle defies belief. Those people have to know they are lying. 

I also find it a little humorous how easily dittoheads accuse someone else of being "whiny" while defending the Tea Party protesters, who do nothing but complain. Maybe because they scream, they don't qualify as whining?

Social Class and Adventurous Youth

Michael Chabon wrote some powerful essays in his recent collection, Manhood for Amateurs, that address the way we try to control and protect the experiences of our children today, compared to how freely and independently our parents allowed us to roam our neighborhoods.

This rings very true for me as I look at my experiences with my own kids and compare them with the routine excursions of my childhood.

But when I walk or drive around my own neighborhood, I do see the occasional individual or pack of kids roaming around, heading to the store, the library, or simply wandering along the irrigation canal in the vague direction of a park or open field. What's interesting is that these kids are almost exclusively young people of color, usually Latino or African.

I say Latino because I hear the kids speaking Spanish to each other and because many of them have a mestizo cast to their complexion and features that is familiar to me from growing up in southern New Mexico. I'd guess that they're probably Mexican American, but that would be assuming more than I know.

I say African, not African American, because there's a small cluster of Somalis living in my part of Boise, part of a slightly larger but still small enclave of refugees who were resettled here in the past decade. So while many of these kids have probably grown up here and speak English, they weren't born here and I don't know their citizenship status.

These two groups of kids seem to have two basic traits in common. First, relatively speaking, they're poorer than the largely middle class suburbanites that surround them. They come from one of several apartment complexes, a trailer park, or a few duplexes occupied by a large number of people. Second, I think that many of them come from families where the parents and other adults grew up in places other than the United States of the late 20th and early 21st century.

I suspect that this combination means that their families have both fewer resources (in terms of time or the money to pay other people for their time) at hand to constantly monitor their children and fewer psychological hangups about leaving their kids to fend for themselves during certain times of the day.

So perhaps these kids have the opportunity to explore and create their own adventures that Chabon argues is denied to middle class American kids in our current culture. And I wonder how that will shape their experiences and attitudes. Are they getting a chance to develop a part of their imaginations that will be stunted in my kids and their peers? Or are they just wandering bored, waiting for a chance to play video games or sign up for a youth sports league?

Now, I'm not arguing that being an adolescent member of an economically disadvantaged minority with the freedom to roam around is the same thing as being a middle class kid with that same freedom. It's not. The middle class white kid has fewer basic needs to worry about and certainly finds it easier to fit in to the surrounding society, particularly in a city as white as Boise.

But our neighborhood is a pretty safe place, and the local branch library is nice, and I see a lot of these kids in and around there. So I hope that they are getting a chance to enjoy some of their unstructured, unsupervised time and indulge in that freedom. Because the irony would be a little hard to bear otherwise.

The other Blog

Just wanted to say that I've added some more poems as well as some personal essays to my other blog, Sand Dreaming of Stars. I'm relatively pleased with them.

So anyone who reads this site should also check that one out. One Hand Clapping will still have the political asides, reviews, and comments on my writing efforts.

Drawing Some Maps

Got a bit stumped with my novel outline over Spring Break, largely because there was no real time or space to think quietly with Lisa and the kids all home, partly because I'm stuck on some point of view issues.*

So I decided to work on setting issues today after running some errands. Wanted to get out of my left brain a bit, so I pulled out some maps I have showing possible configurations of the world's continents 250 million years in the future. Then I started modifying them to create some of the geographic and environmental conditions that I felt would facilitate the formation and style of the civilizations I already had in mind.

Relative success on that front. I have two regions roughly developed.

The one for the Draconic civilization features two large inland seas, a bunch of peninsulas, and a chain of volcanic islands off the coast. Geographically, it's kind of a blend of the Mediterranean with northeast Asia, bleeding into the Central Asian grassland/steppe. This works nicely with some of the imagery and city-state rivalries that I had envisioned. Essentially variants of the Hanseatic League, Peloponnesian League, Venetian maritime empire, and Japanese Shogunate are all in close proximity to each other.


This one for the Serpentine civilization has a huge, Andean or Himalayan-style mountain range with glaciers and a high temperate plateau dominated by a pair of large lakes with no outlets. Then there's a lower mountain range that forms the spine of the rest of the landmass. Within this central mountain range lies another valley with a large, fairly shallow lake.

To the west and south of the central range range are tropical highlands and lowlands that experience coastal monsoons. Several rivers flow into the southern portion. Most of this area is jungle.

To the east is a large, barren patch dominated by rocky hills and flat stretches of sand, broken up only by two long eastward-flowing rivers that are the lifelines of the region. The entire landmass lies at tropical latitude; only the elevation of the plateau region gives it a temperate climate.

The sea to the west is dotted with active volcanic islands formed by the collision of oceanic plates. This configuration puts together the three environs suited to the Aztec/Inca/Maya/Northern India mashup I had been working on.

The next trick is visualizing how these two landmasses connect to each other and then determining the proper scale. I have an idea of what I'm looking for here, but I need to think about the distances involved and the latitude effects a bit more.

Also need a lot of work on the names, but that can be done bit by bit.

Really should work on the city map for Cortado next, as that's more relevant to the actual events of the planned novel.

*My thought right now is to go with a central character POV surrounded by multiple points of view from secondary characters; still trying to balance those out and thinking about whether to switch on a chapter or scene basis within the storyline.

Long, Interesting Talk by Cory Doctorow on E-Publishing

From his blog, Craphound. His talk focuses on the economics of electronic publishing and issues of DRM, copyright, and pricing.

This sort of thing is interesting to me as both a consumer and potential author, though the aspects that relate to being a writer are largely in the background because I've got so very far to go before I become competent at producing viable stories that I could sell.